Sorry Boots, I guess I have to go see some women get punched.
And not ninja women.
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Iāve been sick the last few days so I watched a bunch of low effort movies. I watched the first three spongebob movies and the first one was great and the rest just got worse as they went on. Probably wonāt seek out the latest one. I didnāt have a lot of nostalgia to rely upon for enjoyment. I am also almost 40.
I watched Justice League The New Frontier. Itās an okay adaption of DC The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke. RIP, been ten years since he passed. I met him once at TCAF and asked him to sign my copies of his Parker adaptations. He was really nice and kind. His adaptations are how I found about the Parker series and Point Blank, one of my favourite movies.
I also watched Breakinā and Breakinā 2 Electric Boogaloo and they both ripped. They are sincere colourful movies about the importance of self expression through dance and community. Everyone treats them like a joke but I loved them.
I then watched Birdemic and hated it. Not even so bad itās good. Just bad in such an amateur and terrible way.
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Yeah the Breakin movies are so much fun! I used to watch those regularly. Iām probably due to give those another go.
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I didnāt realise the credits song was a new BOC track. I was listening to the cut-up vocals in the background thinking why did they put like stuff about embryos in this, is this some part of the lore?
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Watched The Killer, which was pretty good, but the new high def transfer drove me nuts because the actor who plays the inspector has an insanely long and curly hair growing out of a mole on his jaw and itās impossible not to see it.
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Being sick in bed for another week means movies, glitz and glamour.
Vive LāAmour: Think this is my least favorite Tsai Ming-liang movie, having watched 3.
Blackout (1997?): Intensely 90s, fly on the wall, mixed media, fever cinema about a addict movie star who maybe had a night that went wrong. An unpleasant movie, but I liked it, if only for the āwe used to make things.ā
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid: Rudie movie alert. One year after McCabe and Mrs Miller some other dudes try to make a historical drama about Jesse James and Cole Younger with a similar level of dirt and grime. Where people from Missouri (the worst place in America -Rudie) and Minnesota canāt understand each other. Where a prostitute only speaks German. A sheriff only speaks Swedish. They filled the movie with every historical accuracy they could read. I loved seeing the real White People melting pot America post Civil War. Also a Mystic Witch who is against traditional medicine!
Owlās Castle 1999 - As English Languageās foremost critic and scholar on Masahiro Shinoda (RIP) I was excited to watch another one. He got a gigantic budget to remake a 60s movie that was based on one of the book that defined pop culture NINJA. This movie has multiple extravagant city sets. Huge establishing shots. And set in the rule of Hideyoshi Ieyasu, the guy between Nobunaga and Tokugawa.
Iāll admit I have never internalized the basics of the warring states period and for that I thank this movie. Much like the pop culture ninja, this movieās story operates in the shadow of Real History. Right up to the boiling alive of Ishikawa Goemon, which Did Happen during this time.
The Ninjas and the women who love them are fictional except for Hanzo Hattori, who was a real ninja/samurai. I could hardly tell the handsome ninjas and the beautiful women apart. It was honestly a shock midway through when both women were on screen at the same time.
I give it 5 out of 5 little ninja darts for having a period music advisor in the credits.
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Sorry thatās for good luck
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I hope it worked out for himā¦sometimes I find like a two inch long whispy white hair coming off my ear outta nowhere and I feel like if I donāt pluck it immediately Iāll die. Maybe thatās why Iām so unlucky 
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One time my brother sprouted this two inch long hair out of his forehead that was super thick, like a piece of copper wire. He had his girlfriend pluck it and blood just started pouring everywhere. It never grew back.Things can always be worse. Have a good day everyone.
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Thereās a camrip of Backrooms out there and at the beginning of it you can hear an old lady chide the cameraperson with āYouāre going to get tired holding that up the whole timeā followed by her granddaughter interjecting āGrandma, shhh!ā
I stopped watching soon after that when I realized nothing in the actual movie was going to be that good
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I had a friend who went on a first date to see a movie with a guy and he camcordered the movie. He ended up being a really really bad guy.
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I saw Antichrist on a first date (her idea) and as a result have collected bad movie date stories for 17 years and this is the first one thatās worse than mine
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Pavane (2026, Netflix)
Tapping into shoddy Clicheeeeee-Territory a few times, but since it was playing a few of its cards so honestly that it surprised me, iāll give it a pass. Standard rom-rom-dramedy, and i am a sucker for that.
A few months back I watched Point Break at a friendās house, who has an extensive collection of movies that he seems to build mostly just to have every movie with āmovie starsā. Unfortunately he was not aware Point Break had a remake, and the movie we ended up watching was that remake. It was a perfectly smooth movie-shaped object that you should expect when you give a music video director $105m to make a movie with. ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE MILLION US DOLLARS.
So anyways to correct this mistake last week he finally got a copy of Point Break (1991), which is a significantly better movie. Pairs well with T2 for the moral of ācops are bad at their job and also they will get you killed.ā I was also pleasantly taken aback by how Keanu, who had a reputation for his acting at the time, was able to subtly grow from a cookie cutter Quantico cadet into a real person through the magic of surfing. The movie goes out of its way to show how every cop, including an off duty cop who wanted to get his gun off, is an idiot. But at the same time Bodhi also gets his friends killed robbing a bank. Being a bank robber is less evil than being a cop, but youāre still betraying the spiritual values of being a beach bum.
More unkind comparisons between the two versions of the movie:
In the remake āJohnny Utahā is his nickname, not his legal name. Coward shit.
Tylerās role is reworked from an innocent bystander who the FBI involves because manipulating people is all theyāre good for, into someone technically involved in the plot but sheās really just there to prove that Utah isnāt gay. More coward shit.
In the original movie you may think āWhy are they skydiving? This is a surfing movie.ā but they then go on to have 2(!) set ups and pay offs for that scene. Meanwhile in the remake thereās a fucking mystic quest to become the buddha if you complete all the xtreme sports and fucking kill me.
In the original Utah only stays in the FBI so he can track down Bodhi, and then throws away his badge as soon as Bodhi dies. In the remake right before Utah goes on one of his quests his contact in the FBI hands him a badge and lets him know heās a super cop now, thatās his reward for being such a good cop.
ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE MILLION DOLLARS.
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i watched the backrooms and enjoyed it, i didnāt think it was like definitively better or different than some of the shorter videos by the same guy but it was a lot of fun as a variant on them - oh, this is how you make that stuff work with third person shots, ah, this is something you couldnāt really do without an actual human crawling around. some really fun monster stuff, which i sorta feel is an underrated aspect of these things: itās easy to talk up liminality and atmosphere rather than the parts where a yelling guy rushes at you, but the monster sequences in these are a delight, really inventively staged across the weird spaces and in their use of sound. loved the first unexpected glimpse of the shoulderpads lady and the wonderfully grody basement lair. the TCM dinner callback was the only part that fell really flat for me - i didnāt buy it with these characters and also was like wait, was i meant to be thinking of them as characters?
this wil sound backhanded, and not to make too much of the directorās age, but a thing i liked about the talkier parts of the movie was a sense of a younger person kind of imagining versions of a ā90s adultā. the furniture store guy doesnāt just run a store, he also appears in costume in his own tv commercials, and sleeps in the store after being kicked out of the house, laying in a prop bed drinking liquor from the bottle in his rumpled salesman suit. the psychiatrist lady isnāt just a psychiatrist but also someone with a line of self-help tapes and accompanying commercials. they both sorta felt like imagined representative types from an older era as reconstructed after the fact - - like iām sure rumpled shirt sales guys still exist but ārumpled shirt sales guyā somehow does feel less prominent as a contemporary archetype than it maybe did in the 90s, if that makes sense.
i found the dinner table showdown between the two totally unearned for this reason, but the rest of the movie was interesting to me as like somebodyās view of their parentās generation. these characters who are both flatly unreflective and addicted to can-do therapyspeak, who probably seem like they have it made to anyone younger but still seem to spend all their time either baffled or angry. and whose secret driving wish, no matter surface differences in personality, always seems to be to climb into some deteriorating memory world and shut the door behind them. people being fascinated by the period before them is pretty common; i was interested in how this one seemed to be about how people in the same period can do the same thing, so many relatives disappearing into oversmooth images of things they maybe once saw or experienced for real.
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could have used some more of those rooms, imo
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Really loved Streets of Fire, I was thoroughly entertained the whole way through. I love the rain-slick music video look to everything, I love the ambiguous 50s/80s setting and costuming, I love the actors and the characters. You could set a whole lot of great stories in this setting. Iād love to see a series in this universe.
One of the things that carries this along nicely is the tight core cast, each actor carries with swagger and purpose, the star of their own movie. Even little bit parts here and there are overflowing with character, people on a bus or at a bar. A movie in no rush to get where itās going, which is nowhere. Loved it.
A few points off for not really being about anything, being mostly vibes. A cool story wouldāve been a nice addition, but, honestly, on the list of things to get right, this makes a very interesting case for movies not necessarily needing much of a story if everything else - sets, action, performances, costuming - are firing on all cylinders.
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ellen aim and the attackers is such a good name
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Streets of Fire is spellbinding despite being about basically vibes and characters
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Streets of fire is what a really good tabletop RPG campaign is actually like.
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